By the late ’60s and early ’70s, if you were young, ambitious, and talented, there was no better place on earth to be than Hollywood. The buzz around movies attracted the best and the brightest of the boomers to the film schools. Everybody wanted to get in on the act. Norman Mailer wanted to make movies more than he wanted to write novels; Andy Warhol wanted to make movies more than he wanted to reproduce Campbell’s soup cans. Rock stars like Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, and the Beatles couldn’t wait to get in front of and, in Dylan’s case, behind the camera.

As Steven Spielberg puts it, “The ’70s was the first time that a kind of age restriction was lifted, and young people were allowed to come rushing in with all of their naïveté and their wisdom and all of the privileges of youth. It was just an avalanche of brave new ideas, which is why the ’70s was such a watershed.”

In 1967, two movies, Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, sent tremors through the industry. Others followed in quick succession: 2001: A Space Odyssey and Rosemary’s Baby in 1968, The Wild Bunch, Midnight Cowboy, and Easy Rider in 1969, M*A*S*H and Five Easy Pieces in 1970, The French Connection, Carnal Knowledge, The Last Picture Show, and McCabe & Mrs. Miller in 1971, and The Godfather in 1972.

Before anyone realized it, there was a movement—instantly dubbed the New Hollywood in the press—led by a new generation of directors. This was to be a directors' decade if ever there was one. Directors as a group enjoyed more power, prestige, and wealth than they ever had before. The great directors of the studio era, like John Ford and Howard Hawks, regarded themselves as nothing more than hired help overpaid to manufacture entertainment, storytellers who shunned self-conscious style lest it interfere with the business at hand.

New Hollywood directors, on the other hand, were unembarrassed—in many cases rightly so—to assume the mantle of the artist, nor did they shrink from developing personal styles that distinguished their work from that of other directors.

The second wave was made up of the early boomers, born during and (mostly) after World War II, the film school generation, the so-called movie brats. This group included Scorsese, Spielberg, George Lucas, John Milius, Paul Schrader, Brian De Palma, and Terrence Malick.

When all was said and done, these directors created a body of work that included, in addition to the titles mentioned above, The Last Detail; Nashville; Faces; Shampoo; A Clockwork Orange; Reds; Paper Moon; The Exorcist; The Godfather, Part II; Mean Streets; Badlands; The Conversation; Taxi Driver; Raging Bull; Apocalypse Now; Jaws; Cabaret; Klute; Carnal Knowledge; American Graffiti; Days of Heaven; Blue Collar; All That Jazz; Annie Hall; Manhattan; Carrie; All the President’s Men; Coming Home; and Star Wars.

So rich was the soil of this decade that it even produced a compelling body of secondary work, then regarded as aesthetically or commercially wanting, that nevertheless has considerable merit, including Scarecrow; Payday; Night Moves; The King of Marvin Gardens; Next Stop, Greenwich Village; Straight Time; Diary of a Mad Housewife; Silent Running; Bad Company; Tracks; Performance; The Wind and the Lion; and many of the films of Cassavetes.

The revolution also facilitated ready access to Hollywood and/or studio distribution for Brits like John Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy), John Boorman (Deliverance), Ken Russell (Women in Love), and Nicholas Roeg (Don’t Look Now). And Europeans like Milos Forman, who made One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; Roman Polanski, who made Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown; Bernardo Bertolucci, who made Last Tango in Paris and 1900; Louis Malle, who made Pretty Baby and Atlantic City; and Sergio Leone, who made The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West. As well as veterans like Don Siegel, Sam Peckinpah, and John Huston, who suddenly found the freedom to do some of their best work, pictures like Dirty Harry, Straw Dogs, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, The Man Who Would Be King, and Fat City.

It brought out the best in journeyman directors like Sydney Pollack and Sidney Lumet, who respectively made They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, and Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon; and allowed an actor such as Clint Eastwood to develop a body of work as a director.

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